How Latin America is Perceived in UN General Debates
2024-05-06
How is Latin America Perceived in Global Diplomacy?
In this presentation, I will explore how Latin America is represented in speeches delivered at the UN General Debate.
My main goals were to understand:
- How often Latin America is mentioned
- In what context it’s discussed
- Who is shaping the narrative
Why This Matters
Understanding how Latin America is talked about at the UN matters for how the region is seen, treated, and engaged with globally.
These speeches shape diplomatic relationships, guide foreign policy, and reflect who gets to define international narratives.
This project matters because representation influences reality.
Mentions of Latin America in UN Speeches
After cleaning the data and filtering only speeches that mentioned Latin America, I looked at how often each country was referenced.
Some countries, like Cuba and Mexico, are mentioned very frequently and others far less. This gives us a first hint at which nations attract the most international attention.
This bar chart helps visualize the rankings of countries by how often they’re mentioned.
What Do These Speeches Talk About?
To better understand how Latin America is discussed at the UN, I started by looking at the most frequently used words in speeches that mention the region.
This gives us a first sense of what kind of language surrounds Latin America in global diplomatic conversations.
A Visual Glimpse of Language
After identifying the most frequent words, I created a wordcloud to visually highlight which terms dominate the discourse about Latin America.
This kind of visualization shows how often words like “nations”, “peace”, and “development” appear.
The size of each word reflects how often it was used in the speeches, giving us a quick sense of tone and focus.
What Are the Main Topics?
This helped me group the speeches based on common themes.
Each row in the chart shows a different topic, and the words inside each row are the ones most often used in that group of speeches.
For example, some topics focus on global cooperation, others on democracy or security.
Which Countries are framing Latin America?
After filtering only the speeches that reference Latin America, I examined which countries tend to mention the region most frequently.
Not surprisingly, the countries that talk most about Latin America in UN debates are: Uruguay, El Salvador, Peru, and Mexico. This reflects a strong regional focus on shared issues and mutual interests.
However, a few non-Latin American countries also appear, such as Laos, Vietnam, Angola, Portugal, and the USA. Their presence suggests geopolitical, historical, or economic connections that drive their engagement with Latin American topics.
This chart reveals who is actively shaping global discourse around Latin America, and helps us understand how attention to the region varies depending on international interests.
Here, we can now observe how Latin America fades in and out of global debates.
This line chart shows how frequently Latin America was mentioned in speeches at the United Nations General Debate, year by year from the early 1970s through 2015. The data suggest that Latin America was a prominent topic during the Cold War era (e.g., due to U.S.–Soviet interest in the region, revolutions, debt crisis). Mentions dropped in later decades, possibly due to changing geopolitical priorities.
